>>40311882Reddit can be good if you're just looking for very specific things quickly. The community is terrible and the people who use it are shitty, but it's decent for instant information, at least when it comes to hobbies.

>>40313104Will check out>>40313125Outside of Stone Lives I didn't really catch that. Hell one of the stories was in a monastary with a tarp on it, so that's close I guess. Maybe I expected more overshadowing of evil corps than intimately personal stories

>>40313249It's defined by Gibson as "High tech, low life." Part of the draw is that cyberpunk focuses on crime, and individuals, and not even necessarily heroes, but people just trying to survive. It's the idea that the future won't be grandiose, or utopian, or really all that different from today. We'll still have drugs, and crime, and poverty.

>>40313273I'd imagine it's almost entirely gone. I've always thought the only thing that could oppose a cyberpunk mega-corp would be a sufficiently zealous cult, more casual religions probably wouldn't work though.

>>40313373Well the idea is that it's so powerful because it's members are basically insane and immune to any dissuasion by fear or greed, basically street paladins and terrorists, and they're too well organized to be killed off completely.

>>40313471I'd imagine the corporations would just take the tactic of using the youthful attraction to rebellion and driving children away from the Faith by advertising atheism, or better yet, a more corporate-approved (read: corporate controlled) religion. Like a salesman.

>>40313506Cults will always be able to find members in spite of larger and more controlled religion, the only way to really minimize the amount of people prone to that would be to actually improve living conditions, and megacorps would never do that. Another idea I had for them would be said cults creating super intelligent AIs to support them, which would either be viewed as angels or worshiped as the gods of the themselves, and "enlightened" people get hooked up with cybernetics that allow psychic communication with said AIs.

>>40313785Whether it's ordinary, and what function it serves, really doesn't determine whether it's cyberpunk to me. It still visually evokes the right feelings, and we already live in the cyberpunk future anyway.

>>40313933Check out Jodorowsky's Dune on netflix NOW! It's about the greatest movie never made. He was going to make Dune and hand picked everyone, all this up and coming artists like HG Giger. It went on to be a major influence behind Alien and Star Wars and he went on and took these ideas and made comics.

>>40313273The original Spider-Man 2099 did a pretty interesting look at religion in a cyberpunk setting. Of course said cyberpunk setting was also dealing with the influence of previously existing superheroes, but it's still a pretty well done cyberpunk setting.

>>40314089They totally are. Somebody organized my clusterfuck Shadowrun gaming folder, filled in the gaps, took out a couple of philosophy texts, and neatly put the Gibson novels in their own folder on the side.

I'm working on some cyberpunk worldbuilding right now, was looking for some input

So, it's safe to assume that in the dystopian cyberpunk future, with the governments having no authority over the corps anymore Net Neutrality is a thing of the past. I'm trying to conceptualize what the internet looks like in a world with "Internet Access Packages" and subscription packages for specific sites and shit. How does this impact "online culture?" Would it be possible to have social media sites as ubiquitous as Facebook or YouTube are today in an internet that's segmented by corporate control?

>>40314199Not sure, I had a bit of a hiatus and when I came back I noticed the pastebin had a much more organized folder with all the stuff in it. I still recognized what I'd uploaded, and partially because of the random Gibson novels in .mobi.

>>40314263Honestly just read the scare-essays written by pro-net-neutrality activists and it'll be a pretty decent starter. For the punks' sake, you'll probably want underground networks and piracy of the fiber lines to be a thing, so that weirdo websites can still exist, if with a ton of effort.

>>40314291Because by keeping the poor in their habits, buying expensive food, drinking liquor, smoking cigarettes, buying internet subscriptions and social-media Premium packages, you keep them poor and keep them feeding the machine. Which is intensely cyberpunk, but also something that's been going on for decades. For what that's worth.

>>40314355By poor I don't mean working class or even people on welfare, I mean people with legitimately no money, homeless people and the like, which I assume would be more abundant in a world with no real government to provide welfare.

>>40313506The problem with that, and a lot of speculative fiction has the same problem, is that nothing is stopping the Church from hiring their own marketing and PR team. Churches already do that. Especially non-denominational and churches centered around a single or small group of central preachers. You don't build a mega-church bigger than a football stadium without decent marketing.

>>40313815>>40313826I understand that, but when paired next to more fantastical images they clash pretty badly. Compare >>40313457, which is just a school hallway with a filter on it, to >>40313617, which is some kind of club or gallery. The second one doesn't look out of place while the first one stands out.

>>40314613>Case was homeless for a while, in NeuromancerBut he had a viable skillset and a reputation. Aside from randomly being selected for, and surviving, some random experiment or product test by megacorps I can't see the average bum advancing anywhere.

>>40314654Ah, that makes sense, though I'm not seeing anything too bad - you pay extra to go fast on premium sites, those sites pay to become premium, advertisers pay more to advertise on premium sites.

>>40314746It'd give the largest corporations a huge advantage in the Internet market, and allow for them to use more predatory business tactics to flush out any free services or smaller companies that compete with their business model.

But yeah, that makes sense as a form of monopoly restriction, though it seems oddly restrictive - here, at least, data services are fairly competitive with each other, and it's often only through good TV+Internet deals that a company can secure your custom, is it not like that in the 'States?

>>40314263>Would it be possible to have social media sites as ubiquitous as Facebook or YouTube are today in an internet that's segmented by corporate control?

Yes, as they represent a prime market for advertising and content production. Sure, you could make it so that FunCo. customers can only visit FunSpace on their internet service, but then you couldn't advertise to JoyCo. customers, who can only visit MyJoy. What would happen is that non-affiliated sites would have to enter into arrangements with the various providers to allow access.

>>40314746It's not like corporations do sleazy and shady things all the time. Seriously, the amount of holes and illegal things corporations do is already pretty ridiculous, it's just giving them even more power to abuse.

>>40314997No, I'm asking how competitive they are - internet, phone and tv companies are always trying to get you to switch here, offering faster speeds, more channels or lower costs. Seeing as they can already do that I'm not really seeing what offering faster connections to some sites would do?

>>40314613Most megachurches are corporations already. Plus I don't think you understand how wealthy the Catholic Church is, in 2012 they spent $170 billion in the USA, during the same year Apple made $150 billion in gross revenue worldwide.

>>40315108Is that really a cyberpunk thing? Assuming it's not on another planet, that kind of postage transport was deemed inefficient back in the 50s. And even if it wasn't email and 3D printers would probably eliminate the need to deliver anything, or really transport anything besides people and raw materials.

>>40315064Oh. There's usually two to three competing service providers in any given place, usually one cable provider and one DSL provider plus maybe some more localized ISP. The cable companies are all incestuously cooperative, they never really compete with each other so it's as close to monopoly as you can get there. DSL seems to be run along similar lines, and good VDSL service isn't even available in many locations, though Centurylink is trying their best. ISPs also try their very best to trick or force you into buying as much worthless bullshit as possible with your service, require contractual commitments so that you can't easily or cheaply switch away, and provide mediocre to bad service because they know they can get away with it. The internet communications market in America is fucking terrible, to the point of tragedy.

>>40315093Oh, definitely. But given the earlier conversation, I think that the Catholic church would be very involved with corporations, certainly not competitive against them. As you said, they're effectively corporate themselves. They feed on the system, they wouldn't go to blows trying to dismantle it. As such they don't really pose a threat to megacorporations.

>>40315131>that kind of postage transportThose are shipping containers dude. And no, it's more "future!" than cyberpunk, but spaceX hangers and FedEx having their own rockets seemed cyberpunk enough when I named it

>>40315178>ISPs also try their very best to trick or force you into buying as much worthless bullshit as possible with your service, require contractual commitments so that you can't easily or cheaply switch away, and provide mediocre to bad service because they know they can get away with it.Yeah, that's pretty standard.

I don't know about the types of connections, but here the companies seem fairly competitive with each other, not so incestuous, though the prices are all fairly close, so maybe I'm not looking hard enough

>>40315178Not the mainstream/large churches anyways. I could see a bunch of smaller, independent churches working heavily with anti-corp groups.

That being said, next time I get to play a cyberpunk game I'm making a street paladin. Protecting the righteous, punishing the wicked, and shepherding the flock with nothing but a bible, handful of stimms, mild amphetamine psychosis, and a four foot piece of pipe.

>>40314560Most people are homeless only for short periods of time, most often because their current housing becomes unviable and they can't immediately find a new place to live. I don't see why that shouldn't be even more common in a cyberpunk future.

>>40315711>Most people are only homeless for short periods of timeI mean bums. The kind who are homeless long enough to have a regular corner they're seen begging at. Also assuming they aren't from a rich family, the mentally ill in a cyberpunk future would be much more likely to end up this way.

>>40315766The 2012 one is amazing, you should see it ASAP. Also Mega City One from certain perspectives can seem pretty cyberpunk, but once you get to anything involving the judges, which is almost everything, it immediately ceases to be. Other Mega Cities could be though.

>>40315766Yes, the new film is fantastic, if a very focused. And Dredd isn't strictly cyberpunk, but it has a lot of the elements one would expect to find in cyberpunk, if from a different perspective.

>>40315833It didn't start out cyberpunk, it was mostly built around 70s dystopic scifi, but has since become very cyberpunk. It's just that you see everything from the view of what would normally be the faceless goons.

>>40315910>It didn't start out cyberpunkIt always had mega-corporations feeding on a populace that was becoming more impotent, but other than that yeah it was pretty far from Cyberpunk. That said a lot of elements from Mega-City One could be pretty awesome in Cyberpunk settings, like City-Blocks or insane hobbies like fatty sports.

>>40315996No, no. Robot waifus are perfectly fine, just don't get an input jack installed in your nervous system to share sensations when you're with her. It's an abomination unto the human form and really, really creepy.

>>40316236What happened? They weren't exactly thriving before but they were doing fine and had a decent amount of regulars? Did the guy who regularly starts them just disappear and no one did it in his place or something?

>>40316284There were a decent amount of people talking about others stuff when they posted actual .pdfs, and I find it weird that like 30 people all quit so fast. Hell all I did in them was talk about other people's shit, I never had the balls to post my own.

>>40317559I'm trying to clean up the flow of my sentences, fix continuity errors for things I figured out later in the book and needed to integrate earlier, shore up the characterizations that were really janky when I started but smoothed out as I went, and basically just make it better.

Settingwise, I've seen it written that CP2013 (the predecessor) and Gibson's work codified cyberpunk. It's a sort of post-apocalypse where there are orbital boulder drivers, Europe is called 'Fortress Europe' and is full of politicking, and America is Blade Runner in the cities and Mad Max outside of them.

>>40314016> It's about the greatest movie never made.Eh, I'd say that's debatable. Jodorowsky makes art-movies that are batshit insane and he does literally say he wants to rape the source material (but with love), so I'm not so sure how his style would lend to sci-fi epics. But on the other hand, it would've been a visual masterpiece. Especially if he would've been able to pull off that continuous zoom shot going into the galaxy.

>>40313273Infinity's world has the Catholic Church reunified and one of the primary lobbies of the PanOceanian government. The Church has a monopoly on resurrection tech and revived its militant arm with its own private army used in conjunction with State forces.

>>40328854Cyberpunk the game, or cyberpunk the genre? Because a genre will often have examples that bring in elements usually outside the genre, those don't in themselves make it part of the genre. I mean, magic isn't cyberpunk just because it's been used in cyberpunk novels and RPGs in the past.

>>40329089Well I'll be honest. I've only recently gotten into strictly "cyberpunk" stuff. And after reading Neuromancer (which has orbital cities that govern them selves) I just assumed it was a thing. Then again, the author of Neuromancer didn't even anticipate "cyberpunk" becoming a genre, so space stuff might be out. I'm no expert.

>>40329250>>40329190Blade Runner's usually called a cyberpunk thing and it's heavy on the sci fi. Big problem with the genre cyberpunk is that it's sci fi which means that it bleeds in with the others easily.